But the size of the modern democracy necessitates the exercise of persuasive power by dominant minds in the shaping of popular judgments in a very different way from that in which it was exercised in former times.
Woodrow Wilson
The Public Record
Woodrow Wilson was the 28th President of the United States, serving from 1913 to 1921. A member of the Democratic Party, he was born in Virginia and raised in Georgia before moving to New Jersey, where he became a prominent political figure. Wilson was a key leader of the Progressive Movement, advocating for reforms such as antitrust legislation and the establishment of the Federal Reserve System. His presidency is also noted for significant events such as the United States' involvement in World War I and his efforts to promote the League of Nations, an international organization aimed at preventing future conflicts.
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There is much shower and much sunshine between the sowing of the seed and the reaping of the harvest, but the harvest is generally reaped after all.” So it must be in all self-governing nations of to-day.
They are not a single audience within sound of an orator’s voice, but a thousand audiences.
Their actions do not spring from a single thrill of feeling, but from slow conclusions following upon much talk.
Because of representation and the railroads to carry representatives to distant capitals, we have been able to rear colossal structures like the government of the United States as easily as the ancients gave political organization to a…
It makes the leaders of our politics, many of them, mere names to our consciousness instead of real persons whom we have seen and heard, and whom we know.
We have to accept rumors concerning them, we have to know them through the variously colored accounts of others; we can seldom test our impressions of their sincerity by standing with them face to face.
Here certainly the ancient pocket republics had much the advantage of us: in them citizens and leaders were always neighbors; they stood constantly in each other’s presence.
Every Athenian knew Themistocles’s manner, and gait, and address, and felt directly the just influence of Aristides.
No Athenian of a later period needed to be told of the vanities and fopperies of Alcibiades, any more than the elder generation needed to have described to them the personality of Pericles.
Our separation from our leaders is the greater peril, because democratic government more than any other needs organization in order to escape disintegration; and it can have organization only by full knowledge of its leaders and full…
Just because it is a vast body to be persuaded, it must know its persuaders; in order to be effective, it must always have choice of men who are impersonated policies.
Just because none but the finest mental batteries, with pure metals and unadulterated acids, can send a current through so huge and yet so rare a medium as democratic opinion, it is the more necessary to look to the excellence of these…
There is no permanent place in democratic leadership except for him who “hath clean hands and a pure heart.” If other men come temporarily into power among us, it is because we cut our leadership up into so many small parts, and do not…
Never before was consistent leadership so necessary; never before was it necessary to concert measures over areas so vast, to adjust laws to so many interests, to make a compact and intelligible unit out of so many fractions, to maintain a…
It is a noteworthy fact that the admiration for our institutions which has during the past few years so suddenly grown to large proportions among publicists abroad is almost all of it directed to the restraints we have effected upon the…
Thus it is always the static, never the dynamic, forces of our government which are praised.
But, after all, progress is motion, government is action.
The waters of democracy are useless in their reservoirs unless they may be used to drive the wheels of policy and administration.
Though we be the most law-abiding and law-directed nation in the world, law has not yet attained to such efficacy among us as to frame, or adjust, or administer itself.
We have no one in Congress who stands for the nation.
Each man stands but for his part of the nation; and so management and combination, which may be effected in the dark, are given the place that should be held by centred and responsible leadership, which would of necessity work in the focus…
Democracy abounds with vitality; but how shall it combine with its other elements of life and strength this power of the governments that know their own minds and their own aims?
There is plenty of the old vitality in our national character to tell, if we will but give it leave.
I believe that we have not made enough of leadership.
Politicians like Woodrow Wilson
